Funding Choices: Google’s Attempt To Own Ads

Funding Choices: Google’s Attempt To Own Ads

As you well know a large proportion of websites make most of their revenue through ad placement. If you want to be clever and avoid these ads, you simply download an ‘ad-blocker’ extension. The likes of which have become increasingly popular over the last decade, with almost 1 in 4 adults using an ad-blocking service of some sort. Ad Blocker Plus recently announced it has surpassed 100 million active installations and while they’ve been working out how to leverage that user base, it sounds like Google has been working on exactly that too.

There are huge amounts of money involved with ad campaigns and the fact that these services are preventing 22% of adult users from being targeted is obviously seen as a problem by the big corporations. Hence Google’s latest idea, Funding Choices, which they claim will give the content creators the chance to have an open conversation with their audiences in a bid to help them understand how the content is created.

The proposition is a clever one and should go some way to ensuring all content creators are able to continue what they are doing knowing that their readers are happy to view the ads. If the dialogue is open and you aren’t blocked from websites if you are unwilling to white-list them – this should hopefully be a good thing for the internet. If we see more censorship based on not whitelisting then we will probably see new ad-blockers that get around the current detection methods and a continued rise in the use of ad-blockers around the world.

This could be a great idea and while we still do see terribly annoying ads that go completely against accessibility guidelines, there has been great improvements in ad awareness with Google in particular pushing for better practice.

Google’s: Ad Experience Report

If you are a content creator who relies on adverts for revenue generation, you’ll likely be happy to hear this news. On the other hand if your website doesn’t utilise an ad network, then it will have no impact on you. That being said, if your in the later and have held back from ad placement because you worry what your audience think, Funding Choices may provide the platform to ask them and test if you can. Let us know if you want to review how Google’s new offering might be of use to your website.